George Clooney is making it his mission to charm the entire Lido at this year’s Venice Film Festival, and so far he’s succeeded.
It’s a task the actor-director has accomplished many times before, including in 2005 Good night, and good luckWhich premiered at the Italian festival, to great acclaim and won the Venice Prize for Screenplay, cementing Clooney’s reputation as a competent director.
The Hollywood icon, who received the Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement Award on Wednesday night and gave a powerful speech as he accepted the honor, covered a wide range of topics at a masterclass in Venice on Thursday, most notably politics, his career, his wife Amal, and the death of a movie star.
Early in the panel, he talked a little about his role — smooth-talking escaped convict Ulysses Everett McGill — in the Coen brothers’ film. Brother, where are you? (2000), a film described by Joel and Ethan Coen to Clooney as being about a “trilogy of idiots”. “The first day I was filming, I did the scene, and then Joel came in. He said, ‘(Your character thinks) he’s the smartest guy in every room you walk into,'” the star said. And of course, because all stupid people think they’re smart, right? “It’s simply the truth,” he said. “Look, we have a president (sic),” he added, prompting laughter from the audience. “They think they’re cool. So that changes the way you perform, right?”
Shortly afterward, Clooney was again asked about politics, but this time in the context of the charity set up by Amal Clooney, the British-Lebanese international human rights lawyer, called the Clooney Foundation for Justice.
He began by saying that his father, 92-year-old journalist, host and broadcaster Nick Clooney, had been telling him that his son’s responsibility in life was to “challenge people who have more power than you and stand up for people who have less power than you. If you do nothing else, you will be successful. I fail a lot, but I try to do it.”
The star admitted he was lucky by birth (although he joked that growing up as a liberal in Kentucky was tough). “There are too many people who don’t have the same lucky moments. I was born in a war zone. I was born in a place with hunger. I was born in a place where women are treated terribly, or journalists are imprisoned, and these people need some luck. And so it’s our job to be part of that solution.”
He said he worked to draw attention to the 2003 genocide in Darfur, Sudan, and that he “tried to make it very loud for a long time.” (…) After 20 years, my wife finally brought some of these men to trial and threw them in prison,” he said of Clooney’s success as a lawyer. “By the way, my wife is the only person who brought ISIS to trial and won,” he said in the hall, to thunderous applause. It’s tough, and it gets the job done.” “We do this for our families. We do it for our friends.”
He added that he is preparing against people who say “shut up” to actors who speak out about human rights and political issues. “I didn’t give up my freedom of speech the minute I became an actor. It also means people can get mad at you and not like you anymore. That’s fair enough. That’s the way it goes. You can’t demand freedom of speech and then say, ‘But don’t say bad things about me,’ right? That’s the deal. I’m getting nasty tweets from the President of the United States,” Clooney added. decent. I can handle it. I’ll do it all right. I’ll be fine. But this is part of life.”
Clooney was given the opportunity to talk more about his co-star, with whom he shares nine-year-old twins, when an attendee asked whether her background as a senior legal figure influenced his take on roles. “No, I don’t think so,” he said. “She reads the scripts before I do it, but she doesn’t have any real say in it. Obviously, if it was something that would offend someone, I probably wouldn’t do it. That’s not really my identity. I’m perfectly happy to play the bad guy and do it if it’s to point out something amiss.”
But he added that he and Amal “had a lot of really interesting discussions.” “I remember when this young woman who had been a victim of ISIS came home, (Iraqi human rights activist) Nadia Murad. We were in England, and Amal had a million cases, and she said, ‘Don’t let me handle this case.’” “I have a lot going on.’ I go, ‘I get it.’ And I went into the living room to talk to Nadia, and about four hours later, I came in and they were both sitting on the floor crying, and I said, ‘You’re handling the case,’ and she said, ‘Yes.’ It was 10 years of her acting, and Nadia eventually won the Nobel Peace Prize for (her work).”
“Amal has taken some very tough stances over the years, and we’ve had to take some serious heat based on that. She wrote an op-ed about President Joe Biden. I got some shit out of that,” Clooney added, saying neither is afraid of backlash. “We have interesting conversations around the table. But you know, we also have two nine-year-olds, we have a normal family life, there’s a lot of laughter and a lot of love, and we’re very lucky, and we really recognize that.”
Clooney delighted the audience for the entire semester, talking about the different styles of Meryl Streep (“She knew all the lines before the table read”) and Julia Roberts (“She would pick up the script and say, ‘Oh, okay,’”), who received an Oscar nomination for the same film (Clooney served as a producer on it, in 2013). August: Osage County).
He was also asked about being one of the last movie stars in Hollywood, and Clooney quickly brought up two of his idols and close friends, Gregory Peck and Paul Newman. “Movie stars were larger than life at that time,” Clooney said. “They totally inspire me, but we’re completely different beasts now. The types of stars that exist now aren’t the same (and) aren’t at the same height. I’m striving to do the best I can.”
At the end of the session, an aspiring actress and director stood up for her portrait and asked Clooney if she could use any of his contacts to get her foot in the door of the industry. He told her: “My partner Grant is here – not here today – but he’s here in Venice with me, and we’ll get your information. We’ll be filming some stuff in Venice starting next year, so that might be something you’re available for.” The hall awarded his kindness with a standing ovation.
The 2026 Venice Film Festival takes place from September 2 to 12.
